A network may be considered a group of stations (e.g., personal computers, servers, mainframes, telephones, etc.) connected to exchange information (i.e., communicate). The transmission medium connecting the group of stations may contain wired and/or wireless segments (e.g., parallel two-wire, twisted pair, shielded pair, coaxial line, waveguide, fiber-optics, satellite, infra-red, etc.). Communication may take place using packets that are exchanged between two or more stations in the group of stations.
Network processing may be considered the management and movement of packet-based communication traffic using network processing hardware. Frame parsing is a key function performed in a network processing application. Frame parsing often includes the extraction and analysis of the contents of a packet header field(s) and the generation of parsing results which guide the subsequent processing of the frame by other hardware and/or software processing elements.